their homes, he said. “I don’t know where the key is. I don’t want to know where the key is. Our house practices responsible gun ownership. I was at a gun range when I was eight. We are trying to promote laws and changes that make gun ownership in this country more responsible.”
On the bus tour, they typically wrapped up around nine p.m., followed by selfies, one-on-one connections with audience members, and dinners with local organizers. By the time the kids staggered back to their hotel rooms it was usually midnight. Then they’d wake up around dawn, drive four to eight hours, and repeat.
It was a massive logistical undertaking. And a tough slog. Halfway through, in Denver, the Parkland kids were still in good spirits, but the grueling schedule was wearing them down. “You eat unhealthy food and you don’t sleep properly and your body’s just always confused,” Jackie said.
“Your body, it’s not made to sleep on a bus,” Alfonso said. “So like I’ll go to sleep, I’ll wake up in two hours, my body will be completely destroyed, right? I’ll drink some water, chew some gum, and it’s just the same thing for so, so long.” He described bus life as a big crew crammed into a small apartment. “We’re twenty-two people in total on the bus and we have about like twenty square feet of up and down and it’s basically split up. There’s a little section where most of the adults stay to do their work, and then there’s just the strip with like beds, the front where the tables are.” Some of the kids would always be working at the tables, Jackie for sure.
Jackie said she was unable to sleep on the bus, so she tried to get work cranked out. Her big challenge was the logistics. She had taken the lead on organizing all the events. Whatever cornfields or mountains were rolling by her bus window, Jackie’s head and phone were several days and thousands of miles ahead, arranging venues, permits, publicity, and speakers. She coordinated with local chapters to handle a thousand tiny details, like T-shirt sales and check-in wristbands, and of course all those kids with clipboards registering young new voters.
“Every morning I wake up to anywhere between twenty and one hundred texts,” Jackie said in late July, as she geared up for the tour’s final leg. She typically worked with three to four lead organizers in each city, and juggled several states at a time.
Many of the connections are with adults as well, and meeting the diminutive seventeen-year-old behind the tour sometimes took them by surprise. Paula Reed, the Columbine teacher who’d met with the other Parkland group in April, was again asked to speak when the bus tour came to Denver. Later, Reed posted this on “When I got out of my car and met Jaclyn, I thought she had to be a different Jaclyn than the one I’d been in contact with about the event. I just didn’t picture someone so young.”
The MFOL team scoured each city for promising young leaders. Every few stops, they coax one or more on board. They arrived in Denver with four kids they had picked up in Houston, one from Milwaukee, and three from Chicago, plus one from Harlem they had connected with earlier. They are cultivating a cadre of young leaders and giving them crash courses in public speaking and other skills. For the first time, MFOL expanded beyond Douglas students and recent graduates on the bus tour, widening out to a national network, with many of these new recruits full members of the national team.
MFOL prides itself on being nimble, and by midsummer the Florida tour was rechristened the “Southern Tour” and expanded to include Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Based on RSVPs over the course of the summer, the group would estimate it met fifty thousand people. The events tended to be well organized, if not always well promoted. They relied on their local contacts to reach local media and local networks. Some kids were great at that, with big networks to plug into. Others clearly had no idea. Most events were sellouts, often standing-room only, but some houses were half-full. Media and promotion was clearly the organization’s weak link.
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A gun group decided to follow them for four days across Texas. It staged small counterprotests at every stop “with guns bigger than they were,” as one of the kids mentioned. When they pulled into Denver a few days later, some of